Three years gone, Six months to go… (almost anyway)

I remember being told by my Mum that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And all my good intentions at the time last year to blog bi-weekly definitely have made my path to the hot place a little bit more easy. So, in penance and to try blogging again here we go.

A lot has happened since September last year, and I'm not quite sure how best to do this, so I've decided to give a bit of photo diary of the last 12 months to give a taste of what's been going on both in PhD-world and my own.

In October/November I was working on the stability analysis of parallel inverters, using small signal stability analysis, the results of the analysis match the simulations relatively well, hopefully these will also match the experimental work as well. Below is the pole-zero plot for the parallel inverters.

Pole-zero plot for parallel inverters

I met one of the founders of Learning Planet, Justin Wickham, in London to discuss the pico hydro scheme they are looking at. You can see more of the area Learning Planet are in here or have a look on their website www.learningplanet.org.uk.

 

The School in Dhawa renovated by Learning Planet

My cousin Helen got married at the end of October, so we headed over to Ireland to celebrate.

Helen and me at her wedding

I helped on the sound desk again with Horfield Theatre Company for their October pantomime, Franky Panky and had a lot of fun - with innuendo and a lot of childish humour. I'm getting a little bit better on the sound, although every so often the wrong person's mic would be turned up… A fun fun week nonetheless!

Franky Panky's Poster

I had a "cruise" to Bruges with my little sister, which was fun - especially all the chocolate!

Me and a bear in Bruges

During November and December I wrote a paper on the experimental turbine work I'd been doing, and submitted it to the Journal of Applied Energy at the beginning of January. It was finally accepted in June, and published here in July! The paper that I presented at WREC was also published in Renewable Energy Journal in July this year as well, here.

A figure from the Applied Energy journal, the slug of water that's ingested by the turbine in one rotation

In the last weekend of November, Hannah and I went to Salisbury to celebrate two years. We had a fun couple of days and saw Stonehenge, the Cathedral, Avebury and the Uffington White Horse.

The Stone Circle at Avebury

I spent Christmas with my parents and sisters, which was great.

With my family at Mount Edgecombe

Back in the lab, I started working on an improved control system to try and reduce any current spikes when the two inverters connected together so that switches won't go bang when the inverters are connected to a grid. This improved control did what it was supposed to in the simulation.

Reduced current spikes on paralleling inverters

I had another family wedding in Ireland, my cousin Gillian got married in early February and Hannah and I headed over for the weekend. Unfortunately snow made our journey back delayed… (I blame Gillian's sister, Jenny, who flew back with us!)

Gillian and Alex's wedding

I found an IEEE conference in Kathmandu that would take place in late September, known as ICSET. I wrote two papers for this conference, one on the turbine testing and the other on a simulation of a off-grid pico hydro network, submitting them by the end of March, which were approved. I'm off to Nepal on the 17th September, which is going to be amazing.

A simple model of an off-grid pico hydro network

I also attended and presented at the EWB research conference at UCL at the end of March, adding to the stress at the time, but really enjoyed it and was interested to hear some of the other projects going on in the EWB universe.

AC grid with distributed generators connected with inverter front ends

After submitting the papers, Hannah and I went off to India for two weeks, and had the most fantastic time. We spent a week in Kerala and a week in Bangalore, and had some amazing experiences, spending a night on a houseboat, riding on an elephant, and visiting some beautiful parts of the countryside.

On a houseboat in Alleppey, Kerala

On returning from India, I started to build some electronics, starting with a simple inverter, four switches and an inductor-capacitor filter. I built a simple control circuit in analogue components to control the output current to a reference sine wave from a signal generator. The circuit managed to produce a relatively good output.

Inverter Mk1 and Output

At the end of April, Hannah and I went to see one of my favourite bands, Feeder, in Cardiff. They were absolutely amazing. Enough said.

At the Feeder gig

By the beginning of May, it was time to do 'Living Below the Line' again (see last years version here). We raised money for MRDF and this time, there were a good 10 of us that did it.

Pasta Dinner during Live Below The Line

Once the original inverter worked, I built a second checking it worked with the basic controller, and then used a real time controller called dSPACE which can use MATLAB models to control things, allowing quick changes to be made to the model and be able to see the result of it. Both inverters worked controlled by the dSPACE which was great.

Parallel Inverters with dSPACE

The Olympic Torch came to Bristol in May, and we went down to the Harbourside to see it. The city was buzzing, and we had a fantastic time watching it arrive.

Olympic Torch arriving in Bristol

I ran a quick tour of the Hydrolab for the University of Bristol's Open Day in June, and showed some of the potential new students around and demonstrated the turbine rig. By the end of the day, my voice was hoarse, but had talked to many hundreds of people.

Turbine rig running

Obviously with London holding the Olympics, I wasn't going to miss going to see some events. We went to see the Beach Volleyball on Horseguards Parade and some Hockey in the Olympic Park, just a most fantastic experience.

Beach Volleyball at Horseguards Parade

Once each of the inverters worked individually, I connected them together, to see how they would work in parallel. They synchronised without blowing up, which was always good, and now in my work I'm trying to improve the performance of the system.

Parallel inverters

Every year Bristol holds an International Balloon Fiesta in Ashton Court, on the outskirts of Bristol. We went to the Nightglow, where the balloons light up to music, and saw a mass take off with Tim, who had come over from New Zealand.

Balloons at the Nightglow

We had a few days in Cornwall, camping. It rained, well it was Cornwall after all, but had a few nice and sunny days, especially down on the Lizard and ate some rather tasty ice-cream too…

Lizard Lighthouse in the sunshine!

A couple of weeks later we returned to Cornwall for a school friend's wedding. Again it rained, and it didn't really let up this time. Argh. Still, we enjoyed an ice-cream in the rain.

Hannah eating an Ice-cream in the rain at Lanhydrock

As well as the Olympics, we also got some tickets for the Paralympics, this time for the swimming, athletics and also saw some judo and table tennis. If anything, we enjoyed this more than the Olympics, the atmosphere was just incredible.

The long jump in the Olympic Stadium

And straight from the Paralympics we headed to the Small is Festival 2012. I had been asked to do a little workshop on pico hydro, and so designed a workshop to build a little crossflow turbine and test it, the workshop went really well and I had a very inspirational weekend. And it didn't rain!

The workshop at Small is Festival

So, hopefully now you're all about caught up with me and my life. I'm really sorry it's taken so long to do this, but I hope I'll be a bit more regular. Not long to go with the PhD now either. Times are scary and fun!

SAM

Time Flies...

I can't believe it's already the end of the year. Well, the last few weeks have been rather stressful. I've been rushing to get the paper for WREC up together. It seemed only yesterday I had got the abstract accepted, and then I was rushing to get the paper in. With help from my supervisors and friends in the lab I managed to get what I think was a fairly good paper into the conference. We'll now see what the reviewers think. After submitting, I was asked to review some other submissions, which seems a bit strange to me, but I'll give it a go!

The turbine rig has been taking up a lot of my time. From the CAD drawings to the final build has been quite quick, just a matter of months. Using the workshop's new laser cutter I've managed to make a lot of the components from thick acrylic, which has helped to reduce the build time. I found the main problem with the laser was that it didn't produce square edges, making the assembly of the casing rather difficult.

Finished turbine rig

We've run the rig with air, attaching the air line to the inlet of the turbine. With a little assistance initially the turbine turns and a can measure a torque, which is fantastic. The problems we've had with the air in starting the turbine shouldn't occur with the water, as it is almost 1000 times more dense so for the inlet flow, it would produce around 1000 times the force. The testing is going to be fun!

I've received most of the components now to fit out the hydrolab in the university to test the turbine in, the pipe work and fittings I'll need to install with the help of the lab technician Jack. There has been a lot of discussion about the best way to achieve the varying pressure at the turbine inlet, there is only one example of a turbine test rig in literature and so I was allowed quite a free reign on ideas. They varied from one that resembles a pico hydro system installation to using the header tank in the lab and bleeding off any excess pressure. Eventually, in the solution we have chosen the water will come down from a header tank in the roof, and the pressure will be controlled through ball valves to ensure the correct pressure at the turbine. We also have wide range of heads to deal with from 0.5m to 3.5m at the turbine, which may cause a few issues. So, the first part of the testing is to see how well we can vary the pressure at the turbine inlet before starting to spin the turbine.

As well as the rushing around, I've managed a bit of time to travel around, the work for Bad Girls kept me in Bristol most weekends for the last few months. At the end of November I went to Paris, which was great fun. We took a bus ride across which was good value, but the other passengers were slightly irritating. I've spent a lot of time on buses in Nepal in the most uncomfortable of positions, but I have to say the 7 hours to Paris had to be one of the worst rides I'd had. The Eurotunnel and company did make up for any lacking in fun on the journey though. Paris always is fun, so much to see and do, it's like walking around a film sometimes so many sites that you've seen on TV. We went up the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and walked for many many miles around the streets. The hotel was in Montmatre, an interesting place most famous for Moulin Rouge, and we certainly found some 'different' shops around. Along the Champs Elysees there was a German Christmas Market, which was strange for the middle of Paris.

The Eiffel Tower lit up at night

The 'interesting' shops around our hotel

Eating a hot dog from the German market

I also went on a bit of an explore around Bristol. All the time I've lived here, it's always been on or near the Gloucester Road to the north of the city. Up and down the Gloucester Road, several buses ply their trade, and I catch them relatively regularly to the city centre, but never beyond. So for an adventure we decided to go for a ride to the end of one of the bus lines, which apparently would take us to Hengrove Depot. I had heard rumours about the south of Bristol - there were only dirt tracks there, people talked a different language, no running water and electricity was only used as an attraction. All of these rumours proved to be false, they had roads, running water and electricity, although their accent was even more bristolian, if that was possible. So, for anyone else thinking of catching a bus to the end of the line, do it, it could be a fun day out (we found a cinema and Harry Potter!)

Have a great Christmas and New Year!

SAM

The first 3 months

I don't know quite what I expected from PhD-land. I knew I had a lot to learn. I was very scared about this. I knew that there were going to be a lot of people who knew a lot more that me. I was very scared of this. I knew I was going to be a lot older than most of the other post graduate researchers, and even some of the post docs. I was very scared of this. And I knew I was going back into full time education, somewhere I had escaped from 5 years before. I was very scared.

However, I knew I was going to be doing some work that could have a real impact, and this was the thing that excited me the most.

On the first day, I had my bag all packed with the text books, note books, pens, pencils and everything one would need for the first day of school.

Things for the first day

The first month or so was getting used to everything. I spent time researching different turbine types, looking at their performance characteristics and where they are used. I learnt a lot about power electronics, the basics on how they work, what they do and so on, and build a switch-mode power supply (SMPS). This can take any voltage level input and give a constant voltage output, and is the backbone of many modern power supplies.

The switch-mode power supply

It was fun building the SMPS, I hadn't really build many electronic circuits before, so the method and testing of it was quite new to me. However, after a quite a few burnt fingers, a little bit of swearing, and putting things around the right way, I eventually got it to work.

I then started to look at the research in the field of pico hydropower. There is surprisingly large amount out there, different people experimenting with new turbine concepts, controllers, generators and loads. The whole spectrum. I realised that although I was going to become an expert in this, it would be just a small area. I would though need a good understanding of all the issues surrounding them as well.

In November, I took a few days off to see a friend in Cockermouth, up in the Lake District. The weekend I planned was one week after the terrible floods up there, the devastation was incredible. The high street was free from water again, but all the shops and houses along there were ruined. We went to nearby Keswick, which didn't get any flooding. It's amazing how localised things like that can be.

Derwent Water

At the beginning of December all the press were focussed on Copenhagen. All the world hoped that an agreement could be made to help stop the climate change calamitous spiral we have set ourselves on. Although everyone is responsible, we do look to our governments for leadership as well. As a part of this, I joined a march in the centre of London called the Wave. Groups from all across the UK, religious, environmental activists, aid organisations, and ordinary people turned up to show how important getting an agreement was. At 3pm on a rainy afternoon, we all waved at the Houses of Parliament to show that we cared and wanted them to represent us with action. However, as we all know, they all left Copenhagen with nothing. Another seemingly impotent gathering of world leaders who can only talk and not actually do anything.

During the Wave march in London

And then it was Christmas. I wasn't quite sure where the time had gone. I had achieved some things, a plan of what I wanted to do for the next few months, I'd found a number of useful papers and was slowly understanding where the level of technology was that I wanted to use. I also was learning about practical electrics, and so decided to light up the lab a little.

Fairy lights in the lab

As Christmas party season approached, I was looking forward to seeing my old office friends, and going home. I had only really had a couple of weeks at home since returning from Nepal in April, what with work, university and other things.

And so here I am. So, Happy Christmas, and here's looking forward to a great 2010!

SAM